


anathema

by pyknicGinger



Series: addiction is a hell, especially when you don't even know what you're addicted to [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Sburb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 11:38:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6077976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyknicGinger/pseuds/pyknicGinger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a cat, too many cigarettes, old chinese takeout, a broken radio, a sleeve of saltine crackers, muted infomercials, spiked coffee creamer, and existential uncertainty</p>
            </blockquote>





	anathema

**Author's Note:**

> an exercise in imagry

The technological abomination perched haphazardly on top of your broken, decades-old television screams static into the otherwise quiet night, cracked LCD screen flashing _12:00_ over and over again even though it's likely long past four in the morning. The primary function of it—the clock part of this grotesque radio-alarm amalgamation—hasn't worked since the day you adopted it for seventy-five cents from a yard sale eight blocks down, and the ancient FM receiver has been slowly following in its partner's wake for some time now, trudging ever-vigilantly toward death. These days you mostly get white noise, punctuated on good nights by thirty or forty minutes of short-lived jazz no matter which station you set the dial to, but you don't particularly mind. Anticipation of the odd musical ephemeron is enough to keep you occupied as you watch grainy infomercials with no sound, chain-smoking or drinking flat beer or eating cold Chinese takeout, ass thoroughly settled in the worn, circa-1960's plush recliner you'd picked up off the side of the road three years ago.   

You're a man of simple pleasures, you think—of cheap living and cheap alcohol and cheap entertainment—and you've never really needed more than what you have. People show up in your life and then evanesce into the morning light too often for you to really care. They walk down the basement stairs to your studio-style, rented-off-Craigslist personal hell, and disappear within a week, disgusted by the way you live and the way you think. You don't particularly care, because you're only searching for one thing, and it is not them.

Only Sisyphus stays, but you don't know if it's because he really cares or because you leave food out at night to lure him back when the weather's cold, let him sleep in the bed you rarely use, and take him to the veterinary clinic when he scraps with other would-be strays. Your relationship with the skinny, scraggly, mangy mess is one of mutual benefit but not mutual respect, because he bites you sometimes and you yell at him sometimes, but he always comes back and you always let him in through the two-by-one basement window. You have never considered yourself a cat person, but sometimes you prefer even the grating yowls for food and sex when he sits outside your window—calling you for the former and whatever unlucky beasts are nearby for the second—over the never-ending station static.

But you won't turn off the radio, not until it dies and you physically can't because that'll be the end of you, anyway. Because the white noise is the only think that can block out the ringing in your ears, the high-pitched hum that only you can hear—the sound that haunts you in the silence and shoots sleep brutally in the back six times when you finally reach out to oblivion's escape. It's easy to forget about the reverberation in your eardrums when you're working, because the bar is always loud and busy, and you're too preoccupied mixing drinks and cleaning up messes to pay it any mind. But when you're home, sticky and fetid and exhausted, it creeps up through the darkness and chokes you, drilling into your skull and gouging your brain.

 _Tinnitus_.

Sometimes it sounds like a voice, like someone calling you, begging you to listen. But you can never make out the words—not really. Just the dichotomy of desperation and welcoming warmth, the unfamiliar familiarity of its tone. You hate it, but you _need it_.

You are your own anathema, an imprecator of divine punishment upon yourself, even as you reach for God. You are the means to your own end, not quite killing yourself but not quite avoiding the consequences of your actions, either. Passively suicidal, caught in a self-destructive loop of booze and nicotine and near-starvation, of sex and drugs and existential indifference. Sometimes you wonder why you wake up every morning, why you go to class; why each night you shower and shave and put on the frayed suit you wear to a bar that likes to think its high-class even when the majority of its patrons are already drunk even before they arrive, but you can never find any kind of real reason. You can't find a reason not to, either, though—so you keep push forward, day after day, night after night.

You are looking for answers, even if you don't know _why_ you're searching, not really. You're used to uncertainty, though—so much so that you've become comfortable in the uncomfortable, pacified by instability and the strange, invigorating sense of freedom it brings. Nothing is guaranteed, everything is unpredictable and absurd. It's marvelous.

(You're lost, but everyone else is lost, too.)

(Although, you think, you might not be so lost anymore.)

You can still hear the whispers behind your ears, the sharp stabbing of sound, so the radio still shrieks—but you know where the voice is coming from, now. You have found God, and He is sleeping in your bed, curled up after collapsing in the snow. He had been cold in an unnatural way, like He was—is—death itself, winter incarnate, the chill of a breeze and the pelting needles of a hurricane; and touching Him had been the first time you'd felt that sensation in so many years. Because you're constantly on fire, burning from the inside out, guts caught in a perpetual cycle of incineration and rehabilitation. You relished in the pain, in the feeling brought on sharp through the haziness of your numb existence otherwise, but when you'd touched God you'd realized that you needed something to quell the flames or you _would_ die.

He had cried, and you had cried (even though you had no idea why), and then you'd slung Him over your back and dragged Him home, leaving most of your things in the library for someone else to deal with. You don't know why you had picked Him up, you don't know why you'd brought Him with you. But the moment you'd looked down at Him, you had been so overwhelmed with familiarity—with love and life and _love_ —that it had felt right. He hadn't complained, so you—uncertain of your own actions, moving like a puppet bound by universal strings, controlled by the hands of something outside of yourself yet still somehow _you_ —had done it. And that had been that.

Your brother had been gone when you kicked open the basement door, either off to spend the night in some nearby motel or already driving back to Texas, fed up with how little you cared, and for once you had been grateful for your uncanny ability to push those close to you away without fail. And God had laughed, clinging to your back and looking around the darkness of the place—the chaos, floor and mismatched end tables and stolen desk littered with books and papers and half-empty containers of questionable-at-best takeout—and the sound had been everywhere all at once, in your head and in your heart and in your lungs. And you'd sucked it in, let it fill you until you had been dizzy and lost and He'd wrapped himself tighter around you, so tight you'd lost your balance and fallen in a heap with Him on the floor.

He'd talked, rambling on about people and places you didn't understand, about how _He'd been looking for you_ and how _He missed you_ and you had only been able to nod and stare and hum at the appropriate times, overwhelmed by the sound of His voice as it resonated, vibrating every cell in your body. He'd known your name, called you _Dave_ , and He didn't seem to expect any kind of response based solely on the fact that He never once paused to breathe. And He never stopped smiling, grinning wide at you even as He cried and cried and cried, laughed and laughed and laughed, and cried and cried again.  

"You don't remember me, do you?" He'd asked, beaming at you while you'd watched His all-powerful, immortal heart snap in two pieces, already knowing the answer, and when you'd shaken your head He'd chuckled and sobbed all at once. "That's fine," He'd replied to your unspoken answer. "I found you, so it's fine."

And then He'd passed out, just like that—head lolling to the side. Exhausted and thin and worn, dark circles under His eyes deep enough to rival your own, and suddenly so oddly frail. As you'd untangled yourself from Him, gathered Him up a second time, you'd wondered how long He'd been looking for you. And you'd wondered why you'd been looking for Him, too.

Now, you sit, staring blankly at the flickering television, listening to screaming static, sucking on the filter of another cigarette. You want a drink, but you can't decide whether you need coffee or something stronger; you want out of your own head, out of the surrealism of it all, because this is too much. Everything is too much. You want sensation and oblivion, you want death and life, you want knowledge and ignorance. You want a punch in the face, bloody lips and black eyes, and you want gentle love between the unwashed sheets of your bed. You feel like two people, two different things being yanked apart and then stitched back together every second the boy, the God is near you.

You finally pass out when the unnatural jazz music breaks through the humming white noise, crackling into the darkness like fizzy lightning, and you dream of tar rivers and pipe organs and an ocean of lava.

* * *

You miss your classes the next day, not woken by the alarm on your phone because its dead and your charger is probably still stuck in the wall of the library if someone hasn't stolen it already. Your spine hurts, your neck cracks when you move, and when you turn around, bleary-eyed and confused and hopeful—Sisyphus is alone in your bed and God is gone. Without thinking, you stumble out of your chair. Your legs are weak and your lower back is numb from so much pressure for so long in the same place, but you don't stop even when you trip, crawling instead.

Because He is missing, and that second part of you that you'd discovered in a single night yet somehow have known longer than your whole life, is missing too. You claw at the empty sheets, throwing your mangy, unwanted (well-loved, needed) feline to the floor as you do, and wonder if it had all been a dream.

You spend the rest of the day locked up in blackness, losing yourself in rancid mugs of two parts rum, one part too-sweet flavored coffee creamer, eating saltine crackers, smoking, and crying.  


End file.
